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Published: February 6, 2012 00:00 IST | Updated: February 6, 2012 04:18 IST February 6, 2012
For soulful management
It was just days after the stock market crash in the early 2000s. In progress was a
boardroom meeting in Mumbai of a company whose group chairman is still a who-is-
who in the country's business circles. All those at the meeting expected him to grieve
over the crisis and its fall-out. Yet he spoke not a word of it.
Instead, he joked, laughed, and charted the road ahead for the company. The tide of
the crash was all around, yet the sea in him was calm.
“I asked him after the meet how he managed to keep cool when things were so choppy
around him. He smiled and told me that as soon as he heard of the crisis, he called up
to book tickets for „Black' and later watched it with his family,” says Professor Saikat
Sen , director of Sri Aurobindo Foundation for Integral Management (SAFIM), a
training and management research institute that functions as a thrust area of Sri
Aurobindo Society, Puducherry.
“To him, it was like problems are spices, without which life would be bland,” Mr. Sen
tells Aparna Nair on the sidelines of a workshop in Coimbatore for corporates, titled
„Productivity without Anxiety'.
Mr. Sen's endeavour is to tell people, those in the business sector, to connect within
and derive energy and calm to be used not just to buoy profit, but for what he calls a
„holistic' life.
For, what ails the corporate sector today is this lack of „holistic' development.
The module of the workshop included time and stress management, and self-mastery
to override the instincts that drain focus.

2. “Research into psychology and the times have gone into the making of each part of
these modules, which were put together after finding that a deeper psychology is
required to address the problems that the corporate sector faces,” says Mr. Sen, who
has years behind him both in the corporate field and as faculty of management schools
such as Vishwabharati University, Shantiniketan.
His was a childhood spent close to Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of Integral Yoga, on
which he based himself as speaker even during his days as a management student.
After starting his career, too, Mr. Sen took up freelance assignments to speak on
psychology and management, and how one affects the other.
“There is more talk of management through consciousness the world over. But none
of the methods address the issue holistically,” he says, giving us examples of the
growing scams in the sector.
“Those behind the scams were once visionaries, and far from corrupt,” he says. These
„giants' were pulled down by psychological forces at play that brought in undue
attachment to possessions and kith and kin.
“So, the problems are deep-rooted, at the psychic level,” he says.
And it is here that institutions such SAFIM have a role to play, Mr. Sen feels.
“We have worked on curriculum structures for management schools. The Institute of
Company Secretaries of India has adopted our syllabus. The Xavier Institute of
Management in Bhubaneswar, too, has come for curriculum research with SAFIM.
Management students from the world over come to train with us,” Mr. Sen says.
This apart, Mr. Sen has worked with several corporates across India, especially in the
oil and energy sector such as Oil India Limited and NTPC, on these concepts. And in
store for SAFIM is an international residential school on management, where
corporate executives will be trained by in-house and visiting faculty.
The future, according to Mr. Sen, is for that management which springs from the soul.
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